Todd Snider - Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables (2012)

Submitted on Sat, 03/10/2012 - 23:14

More than any of his previous albums, on which Snider usually excoriates himself above all others, this one — among his best — is largely a genial catalog of working-class rage and revenge. A vivid, overly detailed songwriter, Snider is a worthy antagonist. “New York Banker” displays at least a little fluency with the lingo of CNBC. “I came to the day I had waited on/just to find out all the money in our pension was gone/reinvested in something called the Abacus bond,” he drawls. “Come to find out the bond born to fail’d been built so that banker could bet his bread against it/when the housing market crashed, our retirement did too.”